It is my birthday month (October). I received a book from my friend as a birthday gift that gave me much needed rest from the absurdity of our everyday by presenting an alternative absurdity. Cursed Bunny (2022), by Korean author Bora Chung is a collection of some of the most vivid short stories I have read in a while. The images they conjured live in my head rent free: A woman is shocked to find that her poo and anything else she has flushed down her toilet has started to form a sentient being, calling her mother from its position in the toilet bowl. She develops an anxiety about defecating and stops going to the toilet. In another story a man, imprisoned his entire life and abused by an unknown, unseen monster, escapes only to be kidnapped by a travelling gang who sell him to fights (on account of his mysterious powers). The stories are horrific and terrifying; yet oddly entertaining in their horror and tease you with their potential to the profound. Reading them felt much like reading fairy tales when I was a child; the traditional ones, the fairy tales that were equally spectacular and horrifying, containing some truth about life but equally may just be taking you on a ride for the sake of it.
Marking a revolution around the sun, October has also been a year since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza. This war and its campaign of genocide against the Palestinian people is potentially the defining event of our times. A year on, aside from the many atrocities of this genocide that we have witnessed –not the least of which are the UK and US governments’ and the media’s support of Israel and simultaneous gaslighting of the general public– I have come to learn more of the networks that exist of transnational solidarity with the people of Palestine. The article, Free Alaa: The anti-imperial threads of abolition has educated me on the extent to which the Palestinian struggle continues to find support from across state boundaries and political causes. British-Egyptian political prisoner Alaa Abdel Fattah has written extensively from his incarceration in a prison outside Egypt about his resistance against the oppression of the state of Egypt and the direct lines of affinity between the Palestinian cause and those of the Egyptian revolution. A prisoner since 2011 due to his protesting the oppressive dictatorship of El Sisi, Fattah was supposed to have walked free at the end of September. October saw his continued, indefinite confinement. His mother is now protesting this failure of the British state to ensure the freedom of one of their own by embarking on a hunger strike. At the time of this writing, she is on day 27.
Grief has woven itself into the fabric of my everyday. For a long time now I have been learning how to live in tandem with realities of loss and longing. I saw an Instagram post a few weeks ago (I can’t find the link for this article! The algorithm has failed me, the irony!) that described grief as an opportunity to return to the memory of the person we have lost. That in this instance, we remember this love and experience its loss again. It is simultaneously an experience of love and pain. The price of love is loss, someone once told me. How does one cope with this, the most common event that we all share?
Music has helped me, and this month Sudanese-Canadian musician Mustafa’s melancholic parsing with sadness and vulnerability has marked my exploration of grief with softness and grace. This process hasn’t all been ease and poise however. Teya Logos, a trans Filipina hard dance and klub DJ and producer has given me avenues to experience anger, grief and humour all at once. Her soundcloud has been my companion to the all too frequent waves of rage I feel toward the batshit crazy events that define our current times. Sampling pop, budots and hard noise, her music takes you on a trip through Filipino pop and queer culture, with an unequivocal radical left twist. Dancing to her heavy klub tracks is cathartic and reminds me that grief and rage are equal companions, and that each should be given time and attention. My favourite tracks include her homage to deceased leader of the Filipino communist party, JoMa Sison, the heavy dance anthem of BEKI BOUNCE and the track I end this bit of writing on: FUCK THE WEST.